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BioWare co-founder wishes Jade Empire had been a 360 launch title

It's one of the few things Greg Zeschuk would like to have done differently with BioWare

From 1995 to 2012, Drs. Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka oversaw the talented folks at BioWare. The duo had enormously successful careers in the games industry, producing multiple triple-A hits, but there is one thing Zeschuk wished he could have changed, and that's shipping Jade Empire as a launch title for the Xbox 360, he revealed to GamesIndustry International in a newly published interview.

The martial arts-inspired RPG was released in April 2005 for the original Xbox, just months before Microsoft launched the Xbox 360 that holiday season. Zeschuk believes that holding the game for the 360's debut and polishing it to take advantage of the newer hardware would have been a wiser course of action for BioWare to take.

"I think making Jade Empire a 360 launch title would have been massive," he said when asked about regrets he may have had about BioWare. "That's a really specific example, but we made a choice, and there are a lot of factors that go into these choices and you can't revisit them. But it's interesting, because it reminds me of what's going on right now with analysts saying that game sales are down because people are waiting for new consoles, and we released Jade Empire into that kind of window. In retrospect, it would've been great to put off a bit and polish the game a bit more."

"We never really had a true launch title right at the beginning, and that would've been fun to have done that once. Mass Effect 1 was in a launch window but ended up kind of being about nine months later or something. It would've been cool to have a game at launch because it could have changed a lot of dynamics."

In the full interview, Zeschuk reflects on his building up a development studio, ultimately selling to investment firm Elevation Partners, subsequently joining EA, and how the console business could be in serious trouble. It's a must read!

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3 Comments

I could certainly see the wisdom in holding the game back for the Xbox 360 launch. BioWare games of late have been built on the principals of choices perpetuating from game to game, and that obviously wasn't going to happen with the Xbox release. If it was on Xbox 360, however, it would have been more possible, and it would have opened the game up to a larger audience as the system sold more, the opposite of what was happening with the Xbox.